Letters to the Editor
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Disapointment in the NY Times
I am not by nature a conspiracy buff.
Why the hatchet job on I.F. Stone in the NY Times book review of the new book on him? Are the conservatives, or neo-cons, or whatever they are, still trying to trash reputations? The NY Times continues to do good work, but the number of ideological supporters is staggering.
The last part of Ron Suskind's new book "The One Percent Doctrine" describes a visit to Daniel Berrigan with one shocking quotation from Berrigan. "I never thought that I would live to see the day that old fashioned journalism would be seen as an act of civil disobediance."
Wow!
The corporate take over of the media today brings us the firing of the Editor of the LA Times. Maybe Keith Olbermann , Air America Radio and the blogs will bring the nation back to its senses.
This means, back to a nation under law that speaks the truth.
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What's wrong with this?
From the article:
But my admiration for him didn't blind me to his mistakes and shortcomings -- especially his reluctance to condemn Soviet repression and brutality until 1956, when he visited Russia for the first time and saw for himself the regime that he would condemn repeatedly for the next three decades as a dictatorial police state.
Sounds like responsible journalism to me. Now, that depends a bit on whether or not he had been defending them, or if he was just failing to pile on and attack them, but not having an opinion until you have first-hand knowledge, especially about a subject with a huge amount of known propoganda floating around, sounds like a responsible thing to do to me. Even more so considering that he then took the time to find out what the truth was, and reported on it afterwards.
I did get all that from the article's commentary though, not from any deep knowledge about the man or his life, so I could be mistaken. But as written it sounds pretty reasonable to me.
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Those who do not learn from the past. . .
Neocon hatchet men are preoccupied with "obsessively and inaccurately rehearsing the moldy debates of the Cold War" for the same reason that totalitarians in any society seek to manipulate history: if Berman, Hitchens, or Coulter can taint all progressive intellectuals who were active in America between the 1930s and the 1980s as agents of Stalinism, and (in Coulter's case) if they can recast McCarthyism as a principled, patriotic movement of opposition to the evil Red menace, they have retroactively legitimized their own radically revisionist view of history, which requires that we forget everything we know about the history of the twentieth century.
As Stalin surely observed while airbrushing his former comrades out of photos, slowly depopulating the reviewing stand in Red Square, he who controls a nation's historical narrative controls its future. Stone matters because of his witness to the essential events of our nation's relevant past. We must resist the airbrushing tactics of the current crop of right-wing would-be Stalinists, and honor those like I.F. Stone who spoke truth to the powerful. Imagine a society in which journalists saw that as part of their job description!
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Thanks for the reminder, Joe
I'd forgotten all about Izzy. Yes, he is missed. I'll definitely read the book.
About his mistakes in recognizing Soviet oppression -- Einstein made the same mistake. He admired Lenin early on in the game,and only much later did Einstein recognize that Stalin was a bit of a disappointment.
But one can understand this from Einstein, because the Communists were persecuted by the same Nazis who plotted to assassinate Einstein. It's a bit harder to understand from someone like Stone. Perhaps the book will shed some light on that.
At least he fully recognized his error. I'm not so sure that Einstein ever did.
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Conason, Berman and I.F.Stone
Joe Conason has penned a vitriolic, unfair and highly unprincipled attack on one of
America's most brilliant intellectuals, Paul Berman. I urge Salon readers to go to the American Prospect website and read the actual exchange between Eric Alterman and Paul Berman, to see how much more nuanced Alterman tried to be, and how Berman seriously and carefully answered Alterman's actual criticism, re the actual import of the Kalugin statement. www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=12081)
Instead of dealing with what Berman actually wrote, Conason resorts to ad hominem slanders about him, such as "he became the useful idiot of George W. Bush." Berman's answer to Alterman manages to put Conason's argument to rest, since Berman effectively shows that he accurately quoted MacPherson, did not depend purely on Kalugin's assertions (which Conason, by the way, distorts) and puts Stone's meetings in the context of the Cold War, during which time Stone stood for many years on the pro-Soviet side, as well as on the nature of the Venona decrypts which implicated Stone.
The definitive book by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr on Venona,"Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America," quoted by MacPherson herself, accurately notes that Blin (pancake) was obviously Stone's code name, and that in Oct. 1944, one KGB officer (under the cover of a TASS press reporter) met with him, felt Stone out for possible recruitment, and received an ambiguous reply. (p.248) In p.33 of Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vasiliev's "The Haunted Wood,"
they refer to a KGB contact in the late 30's known as Blin, (pancake) identified as a New York Post reporter, who obviously was I.F. Stone. The thrust of the story justifies the careful analysis made by Paul Berman in his review and his answer to Alterman, that Stone, as Berman writes, "felt that he and the Soviets did share some principles," and that "is why he maintained his 'cooperation with Soviet intelligence.' "
Conason also resorts to the old leftwing McCarthyite logic, of trying to discredit Berman by comparing him to the likes of Ann Coulter,Herbert Romerstein, Reed Irvine and Robert Novak, who have inaccurately referred to Stone as a KGB agent and a Soviet spy. (He also puts Marty Peretz in their company, which is in and of itself disgraceful)Conason must know, since he claims to have read the MacPherson biography, that she uses Klehr and Haynes' discussion of Venona and whether Stone was or was not "Blin" to discredit the conclusions and charges of Coulter and others. But Conason chooses to lump them all together in an attempt to discredit Berman and to defend Stone.
Finally, Conason claims Stone was "vindicated" on all the issues he wrote about. He was wrong- very wrong- about his conspiratorial theories about the Korean War, which he argued was a South Korean aggression against North Korea, carried out with American support. He was wrong about his analysis of the White Paper on Vietnam, he was wrong in his defense of Alger Hiss, and above all, he was wrong in his decades long support of the Soviets in the Cold War, which began to come to an end after 1968.
Ronald Radosh, Prof. Emeritus of History, CUNY; Senior Adjuct Fellow, the Hudson Institute, Washington, DC. Co-author of "The Rosenberg File."